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Now that plans are being made for the next edition of SocialNow, it’s a good time to post some of my notes from the previous edition. I’m really looking forward to the next conference and hope to meet you there!

Special conference
As you my know SocialNow is special conference. The structure is very different from other conference. The whole idea is to help you (the audience) listen to and select the right internal social platform for your needs. This is done by asking vendors to present to a fictitious company with real-life needs and convince them that your platform is fit for their needs. The company is supported by ‘consultants’ with expertise in IT, design and business. And of course the audience may ask questions as well. Here we go: Talks and tools
The vendor presentations are mixed with several keynotes by Tim Walters, Louise McGregor, Luis Suarez and Euan Semple. I’m not going to summarize those talks. I do want to share my notes about the vendor presentations and round up wit…

Personalization of intranet homepages has been a big topic for years now. Recently some results from a survey were shared and analyzed by Andy Jankowski, I was most surprised by the data about personalization (and left a comment there). According to the research from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge personalization has a negative impact on the way employees value their intranet.My intranet
I know there is research that says only 20% of the employees personalize their intranet when they can. But the above-mentioned conclusion is contrary to all my experiences. When we do intranet strategy and design work for companies, almost all ask for some form of personalization. This doesn't have to mean they will use it, I think. I think employees says this when they ask for personalization: the intranet is fundamentally mine, so I want to be able to tweak it in such a way that it fits my daily needs, not Communication's or IT's needs. Levels of personalization
What kind of personaliz…

Last up at the Content Marketing and Webediting conference is Andrew Davis. His keynote was about less content with more success. I really enjoyed listening to this talk. Lots of examples that I can hardly share in a blogpost. I'll link to the presentation as soon as it's published somewhere.

Key messages from his talk were: We should create content brands, not branded content. It must relate to a subscription. Build a relationship with your audience before they need you.Content brands build relationships, relationships build trust and trust drives revenue.How do you do that? Think like a tv executive.
He had 5 secrets to achieve this (of which I missed one... sorry, it's been a long day): get rich, focus on a nichethink in fractals, explore your nichesexploit content holes… missed this one (will look it up and update this later…)create a hook
That wraps up a great conference, although I'm biased because we organize this conference. Happy to say I spoke to many smart a…

Do you know the difference between multi- and omni-channel? Noz will answer this question during his talk.
Overt selling has given way to problem solving. Sweeping statements have given way to conversation-like message. (Rose)
Good example of omni-content: cards Google is showing based on searches. E.g. showing the opening times of a supermarket when you Google for it, instead of showing you a link to the site of the supermarket.
There are more and more channels and there's more and more need for personalization of content.
We’re realizing content is the strategic business asset, not the deliverable that wrap it. Content is vital across channels.

We must:fix the content (make it media-agnostic; make is reusable, well-modelled; apply semantic metadata; apply audience, applicability and context metadata to decide where and when to route it)assem…

I’m sharing some of my notes from the Content Marketing and
Webediting conference I’m attending today. First up is Margot Bloomstein about content
strategy using slow content for long-term change.
How to give people the right content in the right context?
Margot’s definition of content strategy is: planning of the
creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, brand-appropriate
content.
Margot’s talk is structured around the following ways to
slow down your users with content:
1. Editorial style and structure
Points to tracking personal data. Lots of uptick around
phone and apps to share and capture personal data (Fitbit and the like), but
they don’t happen to good at long-term change. On the other hand 10Q is a good
example of using content for long-term change.
Content affects experience… and the user’s perception it.
Frustrating activities feel slow, but if the activity make
happy it does not feel slow.
2. Discover and comparison-style content type
Think the pathway through…

I’m on my way back from my visit to Stockholm. I was honored to speak at one of Kristian Norling’s Intranatverk conferences. I’ll share my insights from the conference in another post and start with sharing my slides and the story around the slides with you. Please find my slides here:The importance of Why for intranets and digital workplaces #intranatverk from Samuel DriessenSurprise
My talk was about the importance of Why for intranets and digital workplaces. The reason to talk about this topic is my surprise about how often organizations don’t answer the why question and just focus on the what, when and where of intranets. (Research on Swedish and Finnish intranets underlined this. I’ll share more about this in a following post.) I think this is problematic and leads to intranets and digital workplaces that don’t have (enough) value.

Endless debates
When we talk about ‘why’ we could easily get into endless philosophical, demographical or cultural discussions. About why we don’t ask …

Intranet managers
This is also what you hear when you talk with people who are responsible for the intranet. Their role implies they have to master a broad range of skills, if they want to do their job successfully. So is intranet management one of the or the most complex jobs in the world? Intranet disciplines
Let's see which skills a successful intranet manager has to have. I have conducted the following list. Intranet managers need to know: The organization and processes: how does the organization work and what are the key business processes? This is also important because the intranet needs organization (governance) that fits with the overall organization of the company. An intranet manager must be able t…

In my previous post about Jane’s report about the Digital Workplace I focused on what the report said about adoption, challenges and business scenario’s. In this post I’m zeroing in on the survey results about mobile intranet, search, and the scorecard.Mobile intranet
I hear quite some organizations talk about mobile intranet. The report shows only 10% actually have a mobile intranet. And 30-40% have plans to develop one in 2014. To me this is somewhat disappointing, although it does relate to my consultancy work. Mobile intranet is still far away for most companies. Many are (still) working hard to get the 'basics' right. Search
Quite some attention is paid to ‘search’ in the report. Clearly search is not done well in most intranets. I do find it surprising hardly any companies get search right. My experience is this usually has more to do with governance and content design than with technology… Scorecard
Together with an Advisory Board a Digital Workplace Scorecard was define…

Adoption and challenges
I searched the report for ways in which organizations promote internal social networking and support adoption. What I found was that most just let it grow (‘viral adoption’), promote it with official communication, and make sure senior management is involved and gives a good example. I think it would be great if more is shared about how organization support adoption of internal social networking (and digital workplaces). My experience is that many organizations have a hard time growing internal networking and workplaces.
This also relates to the interesting chapter about ‘The new workplace. Challenges and concerns…’, especi…

Well, Jane McConnell’s yearly report about the Digital Workplace has been out for some time now. At that time I read the report (like I do every year), but didn’t have (or make?) time to share my thoughts on it. But I’m sharing them now.

Must-have
Jane’s report, ‘Digital Workplace in the connected organization’, is the most comprehensive report about the digital workplace. It’s her 8th report and it again contains loads of information and interesting insights. As I’ve said before: It’s a must-have for every person interested in or working the intranet, digital workplace and social business space. By the way, Jane regularly shares insightful nuggets from her research and extensive experience over on her blog. Extra valuable
This year’s report clearly has extra value compared to previous editions. The report contains an enormous amount of valuable information. More than ever before Jane gives guidelines how to go through the report, with a short and longer version of the report. Also a …

Back to blogging! Man, I really missed it and have tried several times to get back into the habit of blogging regularly. Typing a few lines of text, but never finalizing the post and hitting the ‘publish’ button. I’ve been wondering for some time why I could cram out a post and I now think I’ve found the source.
As I’ve mentioned I’ve been very busy with all kinds of projects. I’m happy to say that almost all projects have been going and are going great. It’s a joy to work for clients and help them improve their communication and knowledge processes using web technology.
But there’s this one project that is not going right. It’s been going wrong for months and just when you think the project is back on track it derails again. You’ve probably been there. To me this is my creative blackhole. Loads of thinking and energy is poured into this project. Every little detail is thought over. Sucking away creativity and therefore also time to blog. Horrible but true.
Of course there are all ki…

What is the 'digital workplace'? It's consists of 3 connecting circles: the employee's digital home life, employee's digital working life and the organization's digital workplace.
Only 36% of organizations have a formal digital workplace program or function.
The overview of the session relates closely to the digital workplace checklist they developed. The steps that are distinguished are:strategy and approach - 70% of the organizations say they have set up a collaborative platform, only 10% succeed... Do a review of systems and roadmaps and define the as-is landscape of the current digital workplace. Interestingly someone remark: don't focus only on the digital landscape but also how people do their work offline. stakeholders and buy-in - Interesting remark: Digital workplace seems to be resonating more with stak…

Ross starts out by point to the Wikipedia definition of crowdsourcing, but disagree with the "open call" part. It's not limited to 'open calls'.
His definition of crowdsourcing: tapping the mind of many.
And there's a huge number of crowdsourcing initiatives and platforms.

There are two big constraints to external crowdsourcing. It's intellectual property and context.
There are different types of closed crowds, e.g.:employeescustomers
The big difference between open and closed crowds is it's important to have a good reason to have a closed crowd. People that you want you to join the closed community need good reasons to join as well.

The 3rd edition of the SocialNow conference is coming up quickly. This time it will be held in The Netherlands. The previous two editions were held in Portugal. The unique concept of the conference hasn’t changed. The conference is focused on helping you select the right internal social tool. Many people and organizations are struggling with this. There are loads of internal social tools out there and often social tools are already being used internally (e.g. Yammer…). But how do all these tools stack up? As always most internal social tools say they can do everything. But can they really? Even when they have to present their tool against real-life business situations? That’s what SocialNow is about. Many tools will present, but no marketing talk is allowed. The tool has to speak for itself by relating what the tool can do to specific organizational challenges. Such as international collaboration, dispersed knowledge sharing and expertise finding.
These presentations will be mixed wi…

The Enterprise 2.0 is slowly coming to an end. We're at the final keynote round about 'Framework of the Social Enterprise & the Future of Work'.
First up Marie Taillard. Marie challenges us to look beyond the enterprise to the ecosystem. Where is the value in the ecosystem? Where is your customer at? Are we - at the summit - focusing enough on the customer? Internal and external can and should help each other.
Then Peter Vander Auwera about 'Corporate Rebels United, the start of a corporate spring?'. Our orgs no longer serve our needs. They cannot keep pace with the current world. Corporate rebels wants to address this. They love the organizations they work for and address the issues in the organization from a deep personal conviction.
21st century practices of new orgs according to corporate rebels: organizational structureleadingshipstrategic options portfoliodecision makinglean executionsystem innovationself-expression
And Dion Hinchclliffe has the honor to …

Now a practice panel about 'Social as Enabler for Corporate Behavior Change'. First up Celine Schillinger who has been addicted to social collaboration by accident.Celine shares 3 cases in which she has experienced and facilitated change within the company she works for (large pharma company): It all started with an email from her to the CEO, that received no answer. She forwarded it to a small group of friend-colleagues and it became viral. This multi-disciplinary/multi-divisional group of employees decided to meet over lunch and try to address this in a good way. They continued to meet in real-life and support the community with Yammer (called WoMen - capitals are deliberate). They created 62 crowdsources solutions (related to gender-balance. Then the CEO said: Let's meet over lunch. The CEO proposed to do a workshop with the whole leadership team about this topic. From then on this topic was on the agenda and is 'implemented' in the performance metrics. After th…

So, what comes first social tech or new organizational structures, Lee asks.

Step 1 is deal with your org chart, your organizational structure. The culture of work is changing. We are talking about human resources instead of resourceful humans. Productivity has gone quantum. 12 people is the new army.

Hierarchy is one dimension of the organization. It exists and will continue to exist, but it is very expensive to get things done. We will move to small, coordinate agile teams. The general manager that has no specific skills is not something of the future and are generic best-practices.
Communities and networks are the new structure (or actually the old structure of the org). Podular working (Dave Gray) needs an underpinning service platform.
There are companies doing this, like Kyocera (amoeba ma…

Jane defines the digital workplace as the intersection of people, tools and organization.

The two main drivers for the digital workplace are:increasing organizational intelligence;gaining efficiency & cost savings
Key to transformation Jane found in her latest research is that the top management and operational management are twice as involved in strategic decision-making with respect to the digital workplace.
Much more was shared in her slides. Too much, too fast to keep up. I focused on studying her slides instead of blogging... Sorry.
Next up Michel Ezran about the research Lecko does on the adoption of enterprise social networks. They try to measure the level of engagement in 15 organizations.
Some findings: a few transversal communities generate most of the ESN valuedeploying and using a tool does not guarante…

Claire simply had too much slides and information to give you a good summary. Which is great (to be clear)! I'll share a couple of notes from the talk below.

A nice overview of research Jive did on the value companies are getting was shared by Claire (and is inserted in this blogpost).

Business value of internal social was only realized when organizations did the following:

senior leaders role-modellingintegrate social into day-to-day activitiesremoval of other tools
So, how to change your organization and get them ready for internal social? Claire shares the following steps:

process (define what the new way of working looks like, definitely for executives - use cases, which is not persona-focused, focus on processes)incentives (reward open leadership, bonus tied to 'open' objectives)comms/marketing (executive 'launch' message, success stories)traini…

A panel discussion about 'Key factors for strategic enablement' is kicked off by Emanuele Quintarelli. He shares his research on the state of affairs of Enterprise 2.0 projects in Italy. Not a pretty sight: no goals, leaders don't understand, no metrics, but also... social business is here already. Companies are just doing it.

So, how do we move forward? Some remarks by the panel:

Luis Suarez says we are confronted today with the fact we should manage for the longhaul. Employee disengagement is the big issue we should address. Management is the barrier, so we should address that.David Terrar says we should bring internal social back to hard business factsChee Chin Lie: talk less about strategy, but do it. It talks time. BASF is only two year into internal social and he sees lots more potential for his company (and other companies). At BASF recognizes this takes time, but they found it of strategic important.

The first practice panel about 'Social as Enabler for Strategic Business Excellence' by Joachim Heinz and Martial Tardy.
First Tardy of Solvay about the Solvay and Rhodia merger facilitated by means of an Enterprise Social Network. Learnings: don't fear misconduct, fear a ghost townreverse the communication streamsget in gear with a new editorial tempoget on top of social technologies
Next Heinz about Bosch's social business initiatives. Bosch has 300.000 employees. Why social business at Bosch? Because of the network society and to tap into the potential of the huge number of employees. They want to develop to an agile, open and transparent business system in a highly connected environment. Steps they distinguish are ( top-down approach): guidelines and principle (e.g. only 20% closed communities, open/transparent by default)technology and processes (developed an entirely new onboarding wizard developed jointly by Bosch and IBM - helps newcomers understand why, their p…

I'll liveblog large parts of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. I'll try to publish my notes as soon as the talk is over.
First talks at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit are by Jon Mell and Dan Pontefract about 'Heading from Engagement to Passion in Future Work Performance'. Flat army
First, Dan Pontefract about 'Flat army'. Pontefract starts with some stories about his experience in corporate life. Why do organizations feel like jails? Research (Gallup a.o.) shows employee engagement is horrible in most large organizations? In the US research shows this leads to huge losses in productivity. Disengagement is a huge issue in organizations.
How do we avoid disengagement in organizations? Most people want to find purpose at work. At Telus, the company Dan works for with 40.000 employees, they use several different models to encourage engagement in leadership, collaborative tools, etc.
Telus had engagement issues. Half of the employees were not engagement. They decided to address…